The Farm

by Hector Abad

  That was when I decided to get my tubes tied, after the last caesarean, when Simón was born. I know the Church forbids it, but I went to see Father Gabriel and I asked him, Father Gabriel, do you want me to die? Of course not, he said. Does the Church want me to die? I asked, and he said: No, of course not. Then I have to have my fallopian tubes tied because if I get pregnant one more time, the doctor told me, he wouldn’t even take care of me. Lots of women used to bleed to death a century ago, when there was no way to stop having children. And then Father Gabriel said he was going to consult with the bishop and the bishop gave me the authorization to have my tubes tied. Of course I’d already had the operation before Father Gabriel and the bishop gave me permission. I’m not an idiot. I asked them because they like to feel important, and I feel sorry for them thinking they’re not anymore and that we don’t even take them into consideration. And the thing is no one considers them anymore, not even me. I feel sorry for the Church, when I think about it. It’s older and more outdated than me. A pachyderm, an endangered species. I see it when I go to Mass in Palermo: only us old folks go these days and it all seems like a pantomime, an act, at best a custom, but nobody gives a fig what the priest says, nobody really believes that the wine is blood, that the bread is the body of Christ, his real flesh, that confession saves your soul, or that not going to Mass on a Sunday is a mortal sin. I’m the only one who still believes in all that, or tries to believe it, because I lack faith and would like to have more. And who knows, the Church is a very old, very rich, very solid thing. Life takes many turns and maybe its power will come back. Or maybe it’ll disappear entirely, nobody knows.

  ANTONIO

  I’ve found the birth and death certificates for almost all the Ángels in our family, since the first one who arrived in Antioquia, as well as marriage and baptismal certificates for all or almost all their children, even those who died before the age of two, who were the majority. Often they kept using the same name over and over again, as if they could replace a lost child, as if one could be reincarnated in the next until finally one of that name would grow up, cling to life, and reach old age. I could even tell you what they died of or how they were killed, the ones who reached adulthood, one by one. Isaías, Ismael’s son, Abraham’s grandson, died of bilious colic on the trail from La Mama and Jericó, on the back of a mule that was taking him to see Dr. Zoilo Mesa Toro, the first sawbones in the village, but he didn’t get there in time and died on the way, fell off the mule as if struck by lightning, in the eighties of the nineteenth century, and his son Elías had to tie him to the saddle, half covered with four sacks, bent over the back of the mule, to take him into town, for his wake and funeral and burial. Raquel Abad, his widow, had the strength not to sell the recently cleared farms (La Judía, La Mama, and La Oculta) and to put them in the charge of her son, who had come of age not long before, our fourth known ancestor, Elías.

  All Elías’s brothers were taken away by the civil wars of the nineteenth century, recruited by force and lassoed in the village like cattle, sometimes in the service of the Conservative army and sometimes in the Liberal one, and they never returned to the village, either because they stayed somewhere else or, more than likely, because they were killed in battle. It was said that the recruits were taken to the sites of the battles tied hand and foot, and there they put a rifle in their hands and let them go, to try to kill more people on the enemy’s side than on theirs. They were boys, almost children, scared to death, and if they fired those guns it wasn’t for any just or unjust cause, but only to save their own skins. They were not fighting for liberty or for religion or for justice or to have their own country; they weren’t fighting for the color of a political party, not caring whether it was blue or red; they were simply fighting for their lives. And thus the country sank deeper into backwardness and the lands became depopulated, unworked. Elías was spared, precisely because he was able to hide at La Oculta, the farm his father had bought shortly before he died. The farm was in such a strange spot on the mountain, a dip in the middle of the cordillera, almost invisible from any angle, and for that very reason it was and is a good hiding place, and its name itself means hidden: nobody arrives there who doesn’t know the way perfectly, and from a distance it can’t be seen. In those wars so many died and were killed, and so far from home, that sometimes the dead were left lying in the middle of a field, or in a swamp, or in the jungle, and the vultures would eat them. Or maybe they settled in distant lands, on the coast or on the eastern plains, and they never came back due to the shame of returning with blood on their hands from all the people they’d had to kill to be able to survive, or because they forgot the way home, their hearts hardened by war. From these wars there are interminable lists of names of boys who went by force and never returned. Those wars were almost never fought in Antioquia, where everyone was related and didn’t want to kill each other for being Liberals or Tories, federalists or centrists, but the new towns of Antioquia had to contribute, against their will, lots of cannon fodder to stoke the bonfire of the old quarrels of the republic.

  Elías, then, the second Ángel to take charge of La Oculta (and also to expand it by buying adjoining lots), the one spared from the civil wars because he could hide right there, was killed by falling off a rock, on May 15, 1906, up in La Mama, when he was explaining to José Antonio, his firstborn, what the exact boundaries of the farm were. From a secret cliff edge of La Mama, leaning out over an abyss from a rocky outcrop, on the edge of the mountain range that faces the Cauca gorge, you can make out a section of La Oculta. It was the only place from which the farm could be seen in the distance, and that’s why he was explaining where the boundaries were and how far away the white blotches they could see scattered about were their own cattle, which could be sold when they were fattened up, and how far the green rows of coffee and shade trees were theirs. He gave him this explanation, as if it were an involuntary testament, shortly before falling over the precipice. He spent several weeks hovering between life and death with fractured ribs and legs, and in the end he didn’t make it. In those days a broken femur, when they didn’t yet know how to surgically repair it, much less in a rural village, was a death sentence. Elías left two sons, José Antonio and Antonio Máximo, and a string of daughters whose names I’m not going to list here, but they all married locally and left descendants, or became nuns and died saintly deaths, like all the nuns of Jericó, from the Arcila girl, who took to the cloisters to atone for the deaths of the Trejo brothers, up to Mother Laura, the saint who prayed each night for the Liberal soldier who had killed her father. José Antonio inherited La Oculta, the lowland farm; his brother Antonio Máximo, La Mama and La Judía, the farms up in the highlands, for dairy cattle and potatoes. José Antonio was the most successful of all the Ángels, and the one who added the most land to La Oculta and cleared fields to sow good vegetable and coffee crops. He died young, of typhoid, in 1920, in his house in Jericó, in a bathtub filled with cold water they’d put him in to try to bring down his 107-degree fever, and when he stopped breathing, Josué, our grandfather, had to suspend his medical studies in Medellín to take charge of La Oculta and all the family businesses, which he ran well until the depression of the 1930s.

  Grandpa Josué was a tall man, with an imposing demeanor, but timid and with gentle, almost sweet manners. Very decent and very fair, with a social conscience, he was the first in our family to declare himself a liberal in public and a Mason in secret, for which he was even excommunicated in Jericó. He was so furious when they excommunicated him that he rode right inside the church on horseback, as an act of independence and desecration. You excommunicated me? Swallow this little protest, which will never be forgotten in Jericó. He was also a womanizer, more than by vocation, by a strange magnetism he held over women. He didn’t have to ask them, they asked him, and maybe this got him accustomed to intimacy and to an almost unconscious flirtation with them all, young and old, ugly and pretty. He was flirting until the day of his death, in
the last week, with the nurses who took care of him in the clinic, and who liked to go into his room and look after him and laugh with him, a dying man.

  Josué lived for more than eighty years and died in Medellín, in 1982, of cardiac arrest, after two heart attacks. I was present when he died, and my sister Pilar took charge of bathing and dressing his corpse, with my father’s help. Jacobo had taken up the career his father had been forced to interrupt, almost as a duty to the lineage, so besides being the firstborn, he was a doctor. But in spite of being the firstborn, he received only one eighth of La Oculta. It was to be divided evenly between the eight heirs. His portion, however, perhaps in honor of his primogeniture, included the dilapidated shell of the old house beside the lake, with a few coffee fields and pastures to fatten calves, no more than fifty cuadras in total.

  Jacobo, our father, died of pancreatitis in 1994, while his most beloved grandson, Pilar’s eldest son, Lucas, was being held hostage by guerrillas. I am alive today, in my late forties, rapidly approaching my fifties, with a pretty healthy body and habits, but I could die at any moment like any one of us. It could be tomorrow, it could be twenty years hence, most likely I’ll reach an age somewhere in between the 69 years my father reached and the 82 my grandfather died at. The only thing I know is that the year of my death will begin with 20 and be followed by two digits, certainly less than 50. All that will remain of me will be my notes on Jericó and an old coffee farm in Southwest Antioquia, if we manage to hold on to it until I die, and my bones get to be buried in the earth of La Oculta, in that place I call the tomb and Próspero prefers to refer to as “the resting place.” Próspero always finds a Castilian word for things; what we, with our gringofied vocabulary, call the “deck,” he calls the tablao; and el descansadero for the tomb, and pudriero for the septic tank. Yes, in the resting place I’m going to tire of resting forever, so dead, so inert, and as unconscious as a stone. Just like my ancestors, to whom I attempt to give voice, to resuscitate them for an instant in these words. In these words that are also air, that are also smoke, just the shadows of thought, but they last at least a little longer than flesh and our breath.

  EVA

  Long ago it was only male heirs who received and divided up the farms, because it was men who inherited the land, back then; the women got the houses in town and the old furniture, the dinner services, the beds, the dressers, the cutlery, and the silver trays, if they had such things, but not the land. Then that changed for good or ill. If women had been inheriting all along, like we do now, then there would barely be an acre left for each descendant.

  All my father’s sisters and brothers, all my uncles and aunts, sold their lots off bit by bit. It was very sad when they wanted to sell and we didn’t have the money to buy them out. That’s why what’s left of La Oculta is not much land and not much else: a herd of dairy cattle, fourteen cows, and a few heifers to replace them. But nowadays milk isn’t worth anything and it’s very hard to break even on what we spend on concentrates, pasture, vaccinations, inseminations, and everything else. A dozen horses, because Alberto likes to go horseback riding, and everyone knows that horses don’t bring in anything but pleasure and expenditure. We also have fifteen acres planted with coffee, which yield two crops a year, but that doesn’t even bring in enough to pay Próspero, who’s now almost as old as we are and at harvest time contracts day laborers to help him pick the beans. Another eighteen acres of teak plantation, but those trees can’t be cut for another twenty years, so I don’t think it’ll be us who saws them up. And the garden around the house, with fruit trees and flowers, lots of flowers, a small forest of native trees and a path through the woods.

  For me, the lake is the most important part of the farm. La Oculta Lake, as everybody calls it, looks natural and is as integrated into the landscape as the mountains, but it’s actually artificial. Our grandfather Josué had it built in 1939, when he was 39 years old, since he was born with the century. Where the lake is now there was a natural swamp, where a few springs drained out, a marsh full of toads and mosquitos, especially in the rainy season, according to Grandma Miriam. Until it occurred to our grandfather to build a dam with rocks and earth and dig a channel from the stream called La Virgen, to fill it up with freshwater. La Virgen comes down from Jericó and traverses La Oculta, from one end to the other, until it feeds into La Cartama River. La Virgen, Cobo used to say, was like the spinal column of the farm, the backbone, and on each side was our land. Our grandfather said a piece of land with no water was worthless, and La Oculta had three streams, La Virgen, La Guamo, and La Doctora. Now we just have this little piece left, and La Virgen passes unseen through the lake, feeds it with freshwater, and carries on down the slope, to rejoin its main course. The other two streams now pertain to other people’s land.

  These days they’d probably not allow the lake to be built, and they’d even be right; you’d have to request permission from the municipality, from the Ministry of the Environment, from the Mining Ministry, from the indigenous peoples, but in 1939 you didn’t have to request permission; a person did whatever they wanted on their own property. As a result of our grandfather’s idea the unhealthy hollow filled up, the weeds died, the toads hid from so much water, the mosquitos went elsewhere, and there’s the freshwater lake, big, black, imposing, as if it were eternal, as if it had been there for centuries and centuries. The only thing that frightens me is that one day the water will come rushing down with such force that it breaks the dam. If all that water suddenly gushed down the mountainside there would be a tragedy below: it would carry away the roadhouse, kill people and animals caught in its wake. When engineers come by I beg them to take a look at the dam, but they look and look and don’t say anything. They don’t want to commit themselves; they say it might last a century, ten centuries, or break tomorrow. The ground is unstable in these mountains where there are landslides, slippages, floods, and earthquakes. Sometimes I look at the lake for hours and although it feels eternal I know that one day it will be a muddy bed and a disaster: let it not happen to me, or to my sister or brother, let it not happen to my son or my grandchildren, I beg.

  Many people have drowned in the lake. Many that we know of and probably others that we don’t. In my count: Emilia, the youngest daughter of one of my grandparents’ caretakers. A medical student who came up here to camp without permission, supposedly to study for an exam, and who dove into the lake for a swim and never came up again. He left a physiology textbook open, in the shade of a tree. A seminarian who was never found and who Próspero says is the ghost who walks the corridors and makes the floorboards creak even when there’s nobody in the house. The Nadaist poet Amílcar Osorio, who didn’t know how to swim, one night got drunk and dove into the darkness to die.

  Well, that’s what they say, that he was drunk, but according to my cousin Mario, who was with him that day, Amílkar U (as he signed his poems) hadn’t had a single drink the night of his tragedy. Mario says that on February 12, 1985, around eight at night, the poet, a refined and intelligent man, had the strange idea of taking a boat out and rowing on the lake on a moonless night. He had been talking for the whole evening, without smoking or drinking anything, with two friends, Mario himself and Fabián. Shortly after dinner, and when Mario had already gone to bed, the poet decided to go out rowing on the lake. Nothing could be seen except the luminous splatter of fireflies. After a while of silent rowing, there was a splash, like someone falling or jumping into the water. And then a shout that came from the lake. The poet was shouting: “Fabián! Fabián, tell Mario I’m not going to make it!” Then there was silence. Mario jumped out of bed, startled by the shouts, and managed to see Amílcar’s head that was still above the surface of the water. So he dove into the lake, to swim to him and pull him to shore. When he looked up, he saw the poet gazing at him, staring, melancholically, for some moments, and then he sank, very slowly. Forever. The next day they found him on the muddy bottom. Próspero touched him with a bamboo pole, while they
probed the lake inch by inch, in the same boat Amílcar had used. In the poet’s only published book, Vana Stanza, Amílkar U wrote of his drowned body among the water lilies, a sort of masculine Ophelia. In 1985, La Oculta Lake was covered in water lilies around the edges. Mario says that the morning they found him, Aurita López was talking with Amílkar U on the Cámara de Comercio radio station, broadcasting an interview she’d taped with him the previous week, about his only book. And while they pulled his dead body out of the lake, on the radio the poet was talking and talking, and spoke beautifully. That’s how these things are. Later some crazy, scandal-loving nadaístas went so far as to say that Osorio had been murdered, drowned for fun. A lie as big and deep as the lake: slanderers, no one murdered him. He wanted to jump in the lake at night, and no one knows why.

  Another one who drowned there was my cousin Carlos Fernando, my Uncle Javier’s son, when they sold their share of the farm; that sale filled him with a cold, contained rage; he, who had been the most cheerful and most promising of all the cousins, couldn’t accept that the farm had been sold, and began to do crazy, risky things, like scaling the crags with a cattle rope, up the steepest side of the range. And what he did one day was to fill a pair of saddlebags with big round stones, the kind the Cartama’s full of and that are used for stable floors. One night, he drank a whole bottle of aguardiente, took out the canoe, paddled to the middle of the lake, and threw himself in with the saddlebags tied to his back. Divers had to come to bring him up, two days later, because he was so weighed down. Sometimes I take the same wooden canoe that Carlos used to kill himself and paddle around the lake thinking about him, our dear cousin who was going to be an eminent physician, but I realize that I would never commit suicide. It’s just that so many things have happened in the lake that your heart beats faster just looking at it, and your memory gets stirred up with old stories, and absent presences of people who, although they’re not here anymore, you can still sense.